


Calving Diamonds

by jane_potter



Series: Sins of the Fathers [1]
Category: Thor (2011)
Genre: Big Bang Challenge, Character Death, Digital Art, Gender Issues, Graphic Birth Scene, M/M, Mpreg, Nonbinary Character, Other, Pregnancy, Pregnant Sex, Rough Sex, Unreliable Narrator, Worldbuilding
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-02-18
Updated: 2012-02-18
Packaged: 2017-10-31 09:50:32
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 4
Words: 16,881
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/342662
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jane_potter/pseuds/jane_potter
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Set pre-movie. Already well into the war on Midgard, Laufey discovers that he's carrying a child... and that it could be no other's than Odin's. Laufey cannot simply rid himself of his soon-born, no matter that he will have to be on the battlefield while heavy with child. He will keep it, this child who makes him love more than a ruler can afford to, more than a jötunn should at all, and he will defeat Odin anyway, and he’ll do it with his—- their—- child by his side. (Ah, but he does not know that this is not how it will end.)</p><p>Ostensibly, this story is about mpreg... but really it's more of a story about pointless war and grey morality and unreliable narrators, culture clashes and miscommunications and misunderstandings, sex and gender and identity and the erasure of disempowered identities by dominant cultures. Oh, and Laufey being an awesome parent to not-born-yet!Loki. And <i>all the heartbreaks</i>.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Knowmefirst](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Knowmefirst/gifts).



> My first big bang ever! Man, I remember when this all started as a prompt back on the Thor kink meme... Written for the [mpregbb](http://mpregbb.livejournal.com/) challenge on LiveJournal, with the incredible [knowmefirst](http://knowmefirst.livejournal.com/) as my artist! Seriously, you guys, she is SO AWESOME. I said, "I really like this one other picture you did with digital painting. Can you do something like that?" and she said, "Well, I kind of struggled with that medium and that's why I've only used it once, but I'll give it another go!" And then she did FOUR PICTURES. Plus banners and separators!
> 
> [Art masterpost here](http://knowmefirst.livejournal.com/19962.html)!
> 
> As ever, I also owe a huge debt of gratitude to [Llanval](http://archiveofourown.org/users/Llanval/pseuds/Llanval) and _Eidolon_ , which has informed so many of my thoughts and ideas about the Thor fandom in general, and the jötnar specifically.
> 
> Finally, this one goes out to the Anon at the kink meme who asked for "fatherly love gen" and said, "The nine worlds desperately need more Laufey love.” Four months and 18,000 words later, Anon, I'm finished!
> 
> Download the PDF (story and art) [HERE](http://www.4shared.com/office/q-ye4_oT/Calving_Diamonds.html).

Laufey is not in the habit of lying to himself.  
  
Ah, yet immediately he speaks a lie—for what does Laufey call himself now but “he,” and how untrue is that? Too long in contact with the gods of Asgard has left Laufey now voluntarily wearing the mantle of words that he once donned only for simplicity’s sake. “She” had been as good as “he,” back then, save that it had not ensured Laufey the respect and status he deserved when facing the All-Father’s court.  
  
Be language what it may, at his core Laufey is no Æsir, treacherous and complicated to the point of self-deception. Dishonesty is not common among the jötnar, for if there is disagreement or strife they simply let blood solve the matter honestly. The ancient wretch who is Útgarðr-Loki is a strange creature to them all, so oblique in behaviour and the learned manner of sly Æsir snakes. It irritates many that the Nine Realms may now think of all jötnar as cunning liars because of the reach of this one wide-winged sorcerer.  
  
Yet when first Laufey knows himself to be with child, he tells himself that it is not so. The lie is a defence, wrapped around his shoulders sharp as thorns to force away the truth. He is fighting a war. He has no time to bear a child.  
  
But the only thing that cannot be commanded by a ruler is his own body.  
  
When he finally admits the truth to himself, he resents it deeply, this little parasite tapping into the wellspring of strength that Laufey needs entirely for his people and the war. He goes so far as to call a healer for poison, only to be told that here, on Midgard, the healer has little access to the stores of Jötunheimr’s healing houses. This wet, wretchedly green realm has life in abundance, but the healer knows not how to properly administer most of it. Laufey cannot have rid of his burden immediately; he must wait for someone to cross the Bifröst and fetch Laufey’s remedy to the Midgard colony.  
  
At the time he snarls, ill-pleased, but it is this delay that prevents him from making the greatest mistake of his life. The Nornir keep a fine hand on their threads indeed.  
  
In his shelter at the centre of the colony’s high-walled tjald, Laufey paces. He circles the sunken sitting pit carved into the floor, which is a thick layer of ice laid over the realm’s dirt. Green threads of grass are still visible within the glassy surface. He stalks around the shelter, touching the assembly of furniture and trinkets he has been brought back from razed villages, sap-pungent woods and blood-spattered papers and spun fibres and crudely beaten metals. The seiðr-light in the ice walls flickers with the force of his temper as he repairs what damage the Midgardian day-star has done to them (for Laufey lives in the same kind of camp shelter as do his warriors, a hut of ice that would be near-permanent on Jötunheimr but that is so temporary here).  
  
At length he retreats to the alcove of his bed, a bier of ice covered in the soft, colourful furs of Midgardian animals. Even the largest fur, a rough brown pelt with the claws still attached, is absurdly small compared to the skins of Jötunheimr’s beasts. From the way the people of Midgard mount this bear-beast’s head on their walls, Laufey has been given the idea that it is supposedly a feared predator. He wants to laugh at the idea but cannot, not now, with the sour-sick heat of anger in his stomach.  
  
And because he waits, he must think—how? How did this happen? They are at war, have been at war for years; in all that time, Laufey’s body has been nobody’s pleasure-cradle save—  
  
Laufey’s eyes narrow to slits and frost crawls out across the coarse brown fur upon which he lies.  
  
Save Odin, who had come to Laufey for battle in a body matching the size of Laufey’s own, without the golden armour that was too small to fit; Odin, whom Laufey had permitted between his thighs when their hot-running blood had too much altered the tone of their fight—Odin, who had bit into Laufey’s neck near as savagely as he had torn Laufey open below, and made Laufey scream with the joy of bringing his arrogant, overproud enemy to such animal pieces.  
  
And now Laufey can do naught but chuckle hoarsely into the silence, remembering how Odin had seemed to think that this act had been _mastery_ of Laufey, rather than consent to the pleasure that Laufey had deigned to grant Odin. Even when the Ás’s actions had clearly satisfied Laufey just as well, if not more, Odin deluded himself into believing that he had somehow won. _As if there was anything to be lost_.  
  
Aye, but here— _here_ , with _this_ —  
  
Laufey touches a hand to his belly, flat yet but soon heavy.  
  
Here there is something to be won. A child of Odin All-Father, a cut of his flesh that Laufey has stolen away, that Laufey can keep and do with as he pleases.  
  
Laufey had never even thought it possible that he should one day bear a child. Near two thousand gold rings had banded Laufey’s horns afore the war’s beginning, and, having produced no child of his body at such an age, he had thought himself as barren as Jötunheimr’s plains. It had not displeased him any: Laufey’s entire realm was proof that fertility was no requirement for greatness or power. Yet now, whether by a coincidence of very particular timing or some special property of the All-Father’s seed or seiðr, Laufey bears fruit like a Midgardian tree.  
  
Perhaps that was it, Laufey thinks with cynical amusement. Perhaps it was Midgard’s overly fecund influence.  
  
And, having thought it beyond him to bear children—having never prepared himself for this moment, even in passing abstract—it suddenly strikes Laufey hard. One moment he is savage-smiling in the seiðr-light, teeth gleaming blue, and then he falters, cut deep by an emotion that curls into his heart like a claw between his ribs.  
  
He is to have a _child_. And suddenly he cannot think of schemes or bitter victory snatched from Odin; he cannot simply think of his soon-born as a weapon to be honed and wielded and possibly even cast aside as carelessly as a cracked armblade. Something about the idea of sending his first and possibly _only_ child off to die grips Laufey like a dýr’s jaws and grinds his ribs in hard, crushing down on his lungs and heart.  
  
And Laufey realizes, because he does not lie to himself, that if he cannot imagine such a thing now, he will never be able to actually do it once the child has been made flesh.  
  
He begins to laugh out loud, harsh and grinding and utterly mirthless. Odin Glapsviðr has had his victory after all. He has saddled Laufey with a child that he will have to bear and raise but will never be able to use as callously as a soldier must be used—a child that, furthermore, will be Laufey’s weakness and chain, because Laufey _loves_ this unborn babe more than is proper, more than a ruler can afford to love anyone, more than a jötunn should love _at all_.  
  
It doesn’t matter, Laufey thinks, cracking the bone of love between his teeth and self-spitefully sucking its poisonous marrow deep, deep, where it burns so hot that he thinks he might die. He will defeat Odin anyway, and he’ll do it with his— _their_ —child by his side.  
  


  


  
  
He cannot rest. Late in the night, Laufey rises from his bed. Having no taste for company, he does not leave his shelter but goes to the plinth upon which rests the casket. It glisters like a miniature day-star, the blue rage of Jötunheimr’s wind and snow swirling in its heart.  
  
Laufey lays a palm on it, closing his eyes as a keener note of its song moans directly through him, vibrating his bones and settling his heart. He feels the bareness of his crown very acutely, where the scabs of his fallen horns have only just begun to fade. Laufey strokes the heart of winter and feels its glow and indiscriminate bite in the same touch. The casket is so far from home.  
  
The famine on Jötunheimr had begun it all, some little handful of decades ago. The first hard year they had all shrugged off as Jötunheimr’s temperament, and likewise the fifth and even the tenth. The seventeenth had begun to eat from their bones, but Laufey had continued to accept it as a routine cull of the weak and infirm. The thirtieth year had offered poor harvests even from the oceanside tjalds, rare and scanty hauls of fish and kelp. The thirty-sixth had forced several mountain tjalds to consolidate their strength in order to survive with even a quarter of their combined peoples intact.  
  
Jötnar were powerful creatures, but not immortal. Nothing could survive when Jötunheimr decided to kill. By the time Laufey’s proud nobles had suffered enough to bring him their pleas, he had already made the decision to send colonists to Midgard.  
  
It had been done before, millennia ago, in the starvation time of Laufey’s sire’s sire’s sire. Tjalds had been built upon Midgard’s ice, amid its glacial mountain ranges, and they had flourished on the bounty of that realm’s tame oceans. Tales were still told of the days when jötnar had fished with impunity upon shallow blue seas unhaunted by the Dýr of the deep.  
  
The first group of jötnar to journey to Midgard had come from the inland tjalds, those hardest hit by famine conditions harsher than any in Laufey’s time alive. Laufey had sent them away with a heart clear of worry and with great anticipation of the famine’s end, when the colonists would return with fresh songs and legends-to-be on their tongues, and with these nurse health and hope back into his starved realm’s equally starved spirit.  
  
His people had instead returned bearing him a story of exposed, iceless coasts, of lands stripped down to bare rock and violated by the crushing roots of vegetation. _Trees_ had grown where once entire mountains of ice had towered a thousand els into the sky. The second home of the frost giants, the realm that jötnar sought in times of need, had been torn from them as surely as if Midgard had ceased to exist.  
  
It stunk of Odin’s work. He had taken their refuge and raped it, burned away the ice and turned Midgard into another Asgard. Enraged, Laufey had journeyed out of Jötunheimr himself to see what the damage was, unable to believe that Midgard had truly been flayed nearly from pole to pole.  
  
In the far north, at the much-reduced edge of where year-long ice gave way to summer land, Laufey had come across a village of the realm’s mortal people, still as tiny as the stories recalled but otherwise much different, more naked of hair and straighter of back, with high foreheads and delicate jaws. They had ventured far, far out of the central continent they had once inhabited... and they worshipped idols engraved with the many names of Odin.  
  
Enraged, Laufey had promised his people that Midgard would again be their refuge. The work would be long and crushing, but they would remake the realm as it had been so long ago. In the beginning, though, Laufey had balanced the monumental task of healing Midgard against the continued starvation of his people, and had found his people more necessary. The colonies had come first, as they had always been meant to: small settlements positioned in protected fjords, away from both the mortals and the scorch of summer.  
  
Jötunheimr’s famine had stretched on, but with fewer mouths to support on the same meagre yearly harvest, those tjalds left at the oceanside had lived well—leanly, but well. Laufey had ruled from Midgard, viciously unwilling to leave that realm exposed to Odin again. The colonies had eaten well of seal and whale and kelp and crab, had grown strong and fat on such inconceivable bounty… but then they had begun to wither.  
  
Jötunheimr was not merely their birthplace; it was their home. Its heart was their heart, a blue jewel that contained the pulse and breath of Jötunheimr, mined long ago from the deepest mountains. For their long time spent on Midgard, away from the casket’s nourishing song of mountainbones and screaming winter wind, Laufey and his people had begun to starve from within.  
  
Laufey had not even imagined such a thing could happen, for never before had jötnar spent so much time away from the winterheart’s realm. Long they had endured, though, growing hollower and darker, until finally the day had come when Laufey could ask his people to endure no more: the many-shaped horns that crowned their heads had begun to drop like broken branches.  
  
Knowing that such an act would have them living on borrowed time, Laufey had fetched the winterheart away from Jötunheimr, bringing its breath to Midgard. Aye, they had gulped its power like air, and aye, the task of coaxing glaciers back down from the pole had become far easier—but too late for their horns, too late. Laufey himself had been shorn as bare as any immature child, the two thousand rings of his many years glittering coldly on dead, brittle bones, stripped from him, useless.  
  
They had swallowed the humiliation, the shame, as only jötnar knew how. They had turned the rage into sustenance and partaken voraciously of it, transmuted fury into hate and sharpened the hate into blades with the shared, savage oath that Odin Bölverkr would one day feel those blades in his ribcage.  
  


  


  
The casket’s very presence had immediately brought harsher winters to Midgard, shortening the seasons and dimming the summers. Laufey had tasted the first breath of true ice and rejoiced.  
  
The mortals, to Laufey’s surprise, had seemed hard pressed to survive even a fraction of the cold their realm had once been cloaked in. He had assumed they would flee back to the hot soils of their original homelands, which he had had no plans to freeze—after all, Laufey sought only to reclaim what had once been, not to reshape Midgard entirely.  
  
Instead, the mortals had prayed to the Æsir who had destroyed their realm in the first place.  
  
Odin had come down, _daring_ to confront Laufey with a pretence of shocked confusion and righteous wrath, and Laufey had met him with a smile and joyous war between his fangs.  
  


  


  
Laufey does not tell lies, but secrets he can keep in jealous spades. As the war stretches on, he makes the news of his coming child known to none, for it is not their concern. Some know, however, because they know _Laufey_ , and to these he does not deny it.  
  
Fárbauti tells him, not without pity, that he should cull the child. They are at war; they cannot have a burden-bent ruler when they most need him fierce and battle-ready.  
  
Laufey gives Fárbauti the back of his hand, ice crusted viciously on his knuckles. Laufey’s longest and best companion Fárbauti may be, as close to kin as they can come without sharing warlines, but some things Laufey will _not_ hear spoken.  
  
Fárbauti makes the mistake of looking into Laufey’s murderous eyes and sees there how lucky zie was to receive Laufey’s hand and not his blade.  
  
All the nobles of Laufey’s tjalds come to know the truth sooner or later; he sees it in the change of their eyes when they look at him. But he has said nothing and so they may say nothing. Some this relieves. Others it embitters.  
  
Saltgarð-Grímr is one who bites at the unspoken truth until it sours and spoils, growing septic upon zir stilled tongue until finally zie must spit it out. Zie has always been thus. The difference now is that Laufey is in no mood to permit it this time.  
  
“Be rid of it,” Grímr thunders, of the strikingly gentle curve that mars Laufey’s figure of hard, unlovely angles and edges. “Or do you intend to sit fat on the throne in Harvetrtjald while we wage here the war you have brought—”  
  
Zie finishes in a gout of blue ichor, too dumbed by zir rage to have even seen Laufey moving. Laufey removes his weapon from Grímr’s throat with a hard jerk, and the corpse tumbles to the ice-bitten dirt. In Laufey’s hand is the curved sliver of one of his long gold-banded horns, which he is now wont to carry on thongs at his belt, clattering and flashing, because he refuses to be ashamed that they no longer crown his head.  
  
Coldly, Laufey watches all around him as in silence they watch the blood patter wetly from the point of his horn.  
  
There were cleaner ways he could have done it, sharper tools he could have used, but this is brutal and unexpected and it has shocked them all. Laufey has made himself clearer with this one death than he otherwise might have with a hundred:  
  
Every creature is infinitely more savage when protecting its young, and Laufey will be no exception. They are fools not to know it.  
  


  


  
The war labours on, in the night that renders the Æsir half blind and the day that scorches the jötnar’s flesh raw and sore. Odin pushes one direction, towards the tjalds in the fjords, and bellows at Laufey for every village he finds entombed in ice. Then Laufey forces him back, only to find their battlefield driving across the charred wreckage of other villages, burned to the ground though jötnar do not fight with fire. The lie of Odin’s hypocrisy drives him to madness, infuriates him so utterly that he begins to seek out villages to freeze so that Odin, too, should taste berserk frustration.  
  
Laufey goes into battle ever more heavy, and comes from it each time streaked with just as much mud and blood as the time before. He does not believe the Nornir have measured either his thread or his babe’s for this war and so he does not shy from battle. The pale scars of grazing spear-kisses collect on his hide, bisecting the warlines of his sires like Laufey’s own personal brands. They shine, thread-thin and white, even on the curve of his belly.  
  
Laufey tells himself it is good that his child should taste death so young. Perhaps zie will be born without a fear of it. But he also does not deny that the Æsir who left those particular scars died bloodier than the rest of their kind.  
  
Once, Laufey faces down a gold-armoured hulk of a soldier whose spear is far longer than even Laufey’s greatest armblade. Laufey stands already with a twisted ankle and a gore-blue mouth cut across his side, the wound wider and deeper than any that had landed there afore. The Asgardian lunges, and next Laufey knows three jötnar have flung themselves in front of him, roaring. The soldier dies in seconds, in pieces.  
  
The first one to turn around finds Laufey’s blade at his throat. “Asked I you for this?” Laufey snarls. “Gave I orders to be protected?”  
  
“Nay,” says one croak-quietly, because Laufey’s glower demands it be admitted aloud.  
  
Laufey turns, piercing and gutting in one smooth movement the Ás who had tried to charge up behind him.  
  
“Dishonour me not,” Laufey snarls to them, a new layer of red ice freezing on his armblade. He will not thank them for believing so little of him that one Asgardian should be beyond his capabilities.  
  
As a ruler, Laufey must demand so much more of himself than others would dare. This is not the jötunn way, it is _his_ way.  
  


  


  
“I know I may not touch ye, Laufey,” Fárbauti breathes, and Laufey’s eyes flash dangerously even at this daring. “But may I touch your child?”  
  
It says much of them that Fárbauti considers this the lesser request, where for any other two jötnar it would be far greater. But between them it is not a question of trust for Laufey to let Fárbauti’s hands near his gravid self: it is that Laufey cannot admit he needs comfort, and cannot accept it even if Fárbauti offers. But they can make an excuse of the babe. That is not quite lying.  
  
His silence says yes. Beneath Laufey’s stooped stare, Fárbauti kneels at the bedside and rests zir hands on Laufey’s midsection, weighs the curve of it against zir palms, runs zir blackened fingernails along his distorted warlines. Laufey shuts his eyes and bites his tongue until blood runs. His flanks shiver at Fárbauti’s touch.  
  
“It is too small yet,” Fárbauti says quietly.  
  
“ _I know_ ,” Laufey spits, furious that Fárbauti should have put it in the air between them when Laufey has been doing his best to bury this truth deep in a void, where love cannot reach to make it hurt so much.  
  
Head bowed, Fárbauti lays zir tongue to Laufey’s warlines, makes a show of zir devotion by scraping zir cutglass teeth against Laufey’s hide without so much as nicking him.  
  
The night hours pass in this manner, and Laufey permits it, because if Fárbauti so wishes to deprive zirself of all sleep, then this is zir choice. Who is Laufey to say Fárbauti may not make that choice freely?  
  
(Ah, he is too much an Asgardian after all. Love makes him lie, because it terrifies him so.)  
  


  


  
The casket should never have been brought to Midgard.  
  
Laufey hears that in this short time Jötunheimr does not yet suffer for the winterheart’s absence, but this is not the problem. Now Odin has seen its true power, its potential as a weapon. He may have guessed afore that the casket was powerful, may have heard its song from hung on the branches of Yggdrasil, but now he has proof. Warlord that he is, he cannot be anything but greedy for it.  
  
The Nornir are as treacherous as ever—not that Laufey ever anticipated their allegiance, for the allegiance of fate is a thing that does not even exist, let alone exist to be courted. The Nornir shear his warriors’ threads left and right until the tide of war turns for good, pushing Laufey back so far that he knows he will never regain the territory. Odin bears down, his armies breaking the walls of first the colony’s outlying tjalds and then the inner ones. Finally Laufey is left but a handful of tjalds on the fringes of Midgard’s ice cap, where winter still exists to favour the jötnar and the Æsir have yet failed in assault by frigid sea.  
  
Laufey cannot surrender—not because he is Laufey, or because he is a ruler, but because he is jötunn. There is victory and there is loss, and neither is shameful in itself, but surrender is unthinkable. And yet he must remove the winterheart and his people from Midgard before Odin slaughters them all.  
  
Laufey’s sire would have had them all stay and die.  
  
Laufey is not his sire.  
  
Despite the disapproval he sees in the eyes of his nobles, Laufey has the casket sent back to Jötunheimr. They think they are doomed without it.  
  
They are right. That is the point.  
  
Without the casket as a weapon, their loss is assured, and Odin will hammer them back until return to Jötunheimr is the only conceivable option. (For any jötunn who has ever bedded another with the intention of losing the mounting-struggle knows that calculated loss is still loss, honest and honourable, not belly-up surrender. The attempt at resistance makes all the difference.) Odin Blindi may frame Laufey’s placement of the casket as he likes, whether as surrender or merely foolish planning; Laufey holds so little regard for Odin’s powers of understanding that he does not care if Odin thinks him coward or fool.  
  
Aye, it will taste bitter, it will drive them all mad, Laufey included, but they will live to avenge it.  
  
Jötnar are not immortal. If there is a place where they go after shedding their bodies, it is unknown to them, but likely it is no Valhalla. The dark coils of the Underdýr are the only refuge that Laufey can imagine finding in death, and he will not have that for his people. Not this day. Not so that Odin will actually be _right_ to smile and call them vanquished.  
  


  


  
Odin drives them back to Jötunheimr… and follows them down. He shatters the walls of the first tjald his army comes to as though the slaughter of utterly unsuspecting victims is merely a casual announcement of his intentions to take this conflict far beyond the pale of what is necessary.  
  
Laufey bares his teeth and screams frustration into the wind.


	2. Chapter 2

The seiðr-light in the walls of Laufey’s chambers has faded during his time away from Harvetrtjald, leaving nothing but a slick blue ghostshine glimmering in the deepest recesses of the ice. All is as he left it, but lack of attention has allowed a thick layer of frost to rime everything, for no one but Laufey is allowed entrance here without express permission. The Midgardian spoils of war that were sent back to Jötunheimr for him wait in the corridors outside, piles of wealth that he has yet to distribute among his nobles and warriors. Even the chests that contain these treasures are treasure themselves, made of fragrant woods unlike anything that grows on Jötunheimr, and any one empty box would show great favour to a warrior or servant.  
  
But such awards are for the war’s aftermath, and this is not it. Laufey knows not what Odin’s intentions are—  
  
Oh, oh no, that is a lie, and it bites Laufey too swiftly for him to think otherwise. Odin can have but one intention in raising the thunder of war horns on Jötunheimr, and Laufey knows well how Asgard wages her wars. The Æsir once fought for a thousand years, a thousand thousand deaths, all to say that they had bested the Vanir, their all-but-kin. Laufey is not the kind of ruler who can suckle himself on the mead of empty comfort by pretending that Odin will not wage war unto Laufey’s children’s children if that is what Odin deems necessary to count it as a victory.  
  
This is the truth, that Laufey ill-used the winterheart in order to let Odin take the appearance of victory on Midgard, and it was for nothing because Odin was not satisfied, and the Pinnar of Inngangagarð now run blue with the blood of those who had kept the unsuspecting gates of the Bifröst site, where first Odin had brought his bloody ruin and slain them to a one.  
  
— _ah_ , Laufey hopes they have been slain to a one. Else, the children still live with the corpses of their parents, or in the hands of the Æsir, and he truly knows not which is worse.  
  
(Laufey’s sire would have had them all stay and die. Laufey is not his sire.)  
  
Wondering what might have been is an exercise in self-torment. It is thus that Fárbauti finds him, his broad shoulders curled over the death mask of his sire, ungentle fingertips tracing the warlines of Guðrun’s face.  
  
Laufey’s eyes narrow to carmine slits at the near-silent crackle of ice melting open an entrance for Fárbauti, the breath of air from the open corridor, but he does not stir.  
  
“There will be dark enough for ye in the Underdýr's belly,” Fárbauti murmurs, zir deep voice like the hollow and mellifluous wind that mourns through the icicles. “Did ye not miss Jötunheimr’s day-star while on Midgard, that ye now sit here with the walls closed up like a tomb?”  
  
“I am in no mood for this,” Laufey warns.  
  
“Nay,” says Fárbauti, and the sound of a _smile_ in zir voice makes Laufey’s breath catch and hiss with fury. “Ye never are, when I begin.”  
  
“Have you counsel for me?” mocks Laufey, slow and poisonous enough to be taken for gentle were it not for the unsmiling cut of his teeth. “Do you bring tidings of hope and joy to lift the stink of death from my shoulders? Think you that you have anything to offer up but the blade and the life that any common warrior owes me?”  
  
Fárbauti says nothing to this last unkindness, blatantly false as it is. “I said nothing of counsel,” zie reproves mildly. “And joy is little enough to be had that I would keep it for myself, had I any.”  
  
Laufey’s throat gives up a noise that may yet be called some bitter sibling-kin of a laugh.  
  
Fárbauti’s feet pad the ice, crunching faintly through the crust of frost. Zie kneels—not before Laufey, but slightly to one side, close enough to touch but far enough away to not presume. Laufey holds a sharp silence, irritated that Fárbauti has already pried away a chip of his ire.  
  
Still staring down at Guðrun’s death mask, Laufey sees out of the corner of his eyes that Fárbauti still wears armour, metal arm guards on zir muscular forearms and a garment of heavy leather scales wrapped about the hips. He doubts, suddenly, that Fárbauti has visited zir own chambers yet, though they are as spacious and welcoming as befits the oldest companion of the ruler of Jötunheimr and surely Fárbauti’s bones must ache. The thought brings with it abrupt weariness.  
  
“Speak, if it will make you leave sooner,” he growls.  
  
“How does your child?” Fárbauti asks. “Surely zie must kick by now.” But there is a note of hesitation in zir voice, a thing that says Fárbauti is steeled to be struck.  
  
Zie believes Laufey may be carrying a dead thing and not know it.  
  
“Aye,” Laufey allows, turning dangerous eyes on Fárbauti. _Press farther_ , they invite, as does a smiling wolf. “The child does.”  
  
Fárbauti’s shoulders collapse like glacial shelves, zir whole body bowing closer as visible tension bleeds out all at once. Laufey stares, momentarily astonished by such a display of relief, before he turns quickly to suspicion.  
  
“It is not your child,” he says brusquely.  
  
“Nay, Laufey,” Fárbauti agrees, too readily for any disappointment to be present, “I know. Zie is yours.”  
  
“Then why smile so?” demands Laufey. Dagger-sharp and unthinking in his disarmed state of confusion, he accuses, “Did you not think to see a child with half your blood on the throne?”  
  
Fárbauti’s laugh is a wounded thing, sudden and brittle with shock. “It thought my all-but-kin to lose zir only child,” zie says, and ah, that simple confession is a keen, cruel blade to Laufey’s heart.  
  
There are many things he would give to take his words back, but accusations are like knives: withdrawing them does not make the wounds vanish.  
  
“I shame myself,” he whispers, curling one hard palm around the curve of Fárbauti’s bowed, bare skull in all the rough apology a ruler can give.  
  
Fárbauti tips zir head forward to rest against Laufey’s knee. “I honour ye.”  
  
“Do not,” Laufey snaps, but he does so with something thick in his throat, and that makes him even angrier.  
  
“I serve ye,” Fárbauti murmurs, sliding callused fingers ‘round Laufey’s wrist and gripping tight to keep his palm pressed to zir crown. “And your babe.”  
  
Laufey digs his black nails into Fárbauti’s scalp. “Do not mock me.”  
  
“I serve ye with or without orders,” promises Fárbauti, unheeding, and red eyes glint up at Laufey in the gloom of dying seiðr-light. Fárbauti’s encircling hand slides farther up his arm, from the wrist to the crook of Laufey’s elbow, pressing over the ridges of bone and vein and muscle and scar.  
  
Something hot kindles in Laufey’s blood that he has not felt since the beginning of this long, bitter war.  
  
Fárbauti's smile is a low and nebulous thing. “Ye need not say.”  
  
Laufey bares his teeth and does not say.  
  
Fárbauti surges up like a dýr rising from the gloom, pressing Laufey back flat upon the bier of his bed and looming over him, calves clamped tight to either side of Laufey’s thighs. Laufey bites his tongue to hold back the stupid, instinctive demand of Asked I you to touch me? If he says it aloud, it will also be in the air between them, unspoken, that he is not telling Fárbauti to stop, that perhaps he may want or even need this, and even that little admission is too much.  
  
Fárbauti arches over him, bowing down to tongue the warlines snaking over Laufey’s neck and shoulders while keeping one palm pressed securely to the swell of Laufey’s belly. Laufey bites Fárbauti’s ear, zir jaw, even the cord of sinew in zir throat, and his teeth are unkind. Fárbauti makes a noise of pain, almost crooning, and draws more fervently at Laufey’s flesh.  
  
Feeling need stir within him, hot and urgent for how long it has been denied, Laufey twists to dislodge Fárbauti’s hold on him. He means to lash out, to throw a leg around Fárbauti’s hip and flip them over, but the hook of his knee pulls Fárbauti’s hips sharply against his and against the gravid curve between them, jolting Laufey back to reality.  
  
He winces and pushes Fárbauti away immediately—almost unnecessary, for the way Fárbauti recoiled upon jarring Laufey’s belly.  
  
Laufey is not the same creature that he was at the beginning of this all, oh no; he is changed many times over, not least on the day that he first felt the quickening, that flutter of swelling life beneath his palm. He knows how wretchedly incautious it is of him to go into battle with a babe inside him, yet as a ruler he can do naught else but fight alongside his warriors and trust that his thread and his child’s are not yet played out.  
  
The breathless, brutal push and slam of bodies in the mounting-struggle, though—aye, it is a joy, and one Laufey knows well, but it is a superfluous risk that he cannot allow.  
  
He curses himself and Fárbauti for forgetting it. Even if he went into the struggle with whole intent to lose, he still would have to fight until Fárbauti bore him down into moaning pleasure. Else, what? Surrender?  
  
Teeth bared, Laufey pushes himself off the bed, only for Fárbauti to catch his wrist and stay him.  
  
“Ye give it up too soon, my friend,” Fárbauti says, a teasing smile in zir voice. “Get ye back and bite me again.”  
  
Laufey backhands Fárbauti across the face instead.  
  
“Either you think me a flawless fighter,” he rumbles, near-murder in his heart, “or a careless sire indeed.”  
  
“Ah,” Fárbauti says, looking nothing short of astonished as zie touches the bloody cut in zir lip. And then, “Ah,” as sharp kenning kindles in zir eyes. “Ye fear that I ask ye to fight, Höfðingi? That I seek a partner ready to pry apart my thighs, or one whose face I can grind against the ice?”  
  
“What, then?” demands Laufey savagely. “You would shame us both to lie down and let me have you.”  
  
Aye, it would: shame to Fárbauti, for thinking so little of zir worth as to let zirself be taken by someone who had not proven himself, and shame to Laufey, for taking pleasure in someone who so disrespected him by asking nothing of him, as if he were unable to make a suitable show of strength. And even that is a dangerous suggestion, for the only other interpretation is that Fárbauti means Laufey to be the taken, without so much as testing his partner, and that—  
  
“We have too long been companions, I think,” Fárbauti says quietly, thoughtfully. “Forgive me that I sometimes forget that things are very different for a ruler.”  
  
Laufey stares down at zir with narrowed and unforgiving eyes.  
  
“All your life ye have known only the best, the worthiest suitors, and they were not lacking for enthusiasm to prove it. But your people, Laufey—” And here Fárbauti’s lips part in an apologetic smile— “—your people know that it is sometimes only necessary to win by a little. We do not all need to be conquerors.”  
  
“And why tell me this now, after so many years? You will recall that you never lacked for such enthusiasm, either.”  
  
“Aye,” Fárbauti agrees, ruefully. “But did ye truly think that those years ago, when my arms were both broken and my wounds still raw from that shear-scale hunt, I was got with child by Gnúpr as ferociously as ye and I have always done? Or that I demanded our same kind of fight from Menja when zie was well full with twins?”  
  
How strange, that he can find himself surprised to see his oldest, greatest companion in new light ever after so many centuries.  
  
“Then,” he says slowly, “what you say is that…”  
  
“That if only a little fight is offered, only a little fight is given. And that is enough.”  
  
Laufey’s face is a frigid and unyielding thing.  
  
“But I am not one of my people,” he says softly, his words like stones. “I am a ruler.”  
  
There is silence, total and complete, and then Fárbauti draws a very quiet breath. “Forgive me, Höfðingi,” zie murmurs, sliding from the bed and to the floor, to zir knees, palms all the way to the floor. There is something horrible about the ashen submission in Fárbauti’s voice. “I do forget myself indeed.”  
  
And then Laufey is taking zir wrist, pulling Fárbauti upwards and twisting zir around, pushing zir against the bed and backwards onto it. He crawls on top of Fárbauti with his belly round between them and cups the curve of Fárbauti’s skull in both palms, tipping Fárbauti’s head forward to scrape his teeth across the warlines of zir forehead and kiss the faded scars where gleaming, curling horns once reared.  
  
“You serve me,” Laufey says as if to remind zir, throat harsh and tight, as close to fear as he ever comes.  
  
Fárbauti’s eyes gleam like rubies in the dark. “Aye, and without orders.”  
  
“Then I will not say,” Laufey rasps, burying his face against the crook of Fárbauti’s shoulder and clutching close. He cannot say, and could not accept if Fárbauti were to put this daring, subversive idea into words a second time.  
  
“Ye need not,” Fárbauti whispers, as zie traces needle-sharp nails along the grooves and ridges of the warlines on Laufey’s back. Laufey’s skin tingles and shivers. “Have I not proven myself to ye afore? And how could I ever think ye unworthy, when I already know so well the strength your body has?”  
  
Laufey says nothing as Fárbauti rolls them over and lays Laufey out upon the furs on his back; his eyes are shut and he breathes raggedly, hitching and shivering at each unseen touch. He has never known anything like this, and much as Fárbauti’s touch stokes the burn of need in Laufey’s blood, it is a struggle not to resist.  
  
He is a ruler and the price paid to have him should be high, that only the best and worthiest may make a pleasure-cradle of Laufey’s body, but here and now, in the dark of Laufey’s closed and tomblike chambers, Laufey asks no price higher than the barest of pressures to hold him down, the slide of callused palms along his inner thighs to spread them open.  
  
Fárbauti’s hands slow as they find the ends of Laufey’s warlines, the place on his inner thighs where the lines fade off to smooth flesh unmarked by anything but the scars of some other victor’s fingernails, from another, more forceful coupling. A hot shudder of anticipation prickles over Laufey’s skin, followed by a hissing exhale as Fárbauti’s fingers finally reach the wet folds between his legs. Zir needle-nailed fingertips are now capped by slick blunt seiðr-ice that leaves unmelting trails of cold on Laufey’s burning skin.  
  
Three fingers hook and push in hard. Laufey arches his back involuntarily, his blood so hot with need that what streaks through him is as much pleasure as pain.  
  
The sudden stretch of his time-tightened channel around Fárbauti's thick fingers is glorious. His inner muscles clamp hard around the intrusion to welcome it in greedy agony, hips jerking up to shove Fárbauti's fingers deeper as if to spite his own self with the hurt.  
  
Red eyes looking down hungrily, Fárbauti murmurs something unintelligible. Slowly, deliberately, zie pushes in until zir fingers are buried to the third knuckle, bearing hard against the too-tight resistance of Laufey's body until he is split wide open. Straining with the effort it takes to keep breathing as his loins throb with agony and ripe, hot need, Laufey can only find it in himself to be pleased that he will not have to strike Fárbauti across the head after all.  
  
For a few breathless moments, the two of them fumble blindly for each other. Fárbauti’s other hand finds Laufey’s length and Laufey’s ungentle fingers claw at the nape of Fárbauti’s neck to draw zir down, closer. Then their bodies find the fit and slide together like the interlocking curves of incised knotwork, each angle finding a soft place to press, each joint hooking just so over a curve. Their chests push together as they inhale as one, Fárbauti's barrel-broad ribcage against Laufey's chest laddered with bones and lean muscle.  
  
Laufey grunts in satisfaction as Fárbauti couples a long stroke of the palm with a twist of the fingers inside him. His muscles are loosening up, and his pulse beats hard in the slick, blood-full folds of his sex.  
  
The seiðr-ice that caps Fárbauti's war-sharp nails is a spot of dull, aching cold against the hot soft flesh of his insides as Fárbauti pushes deep, withdraws, curves zir fingers to press against that tender place deep in the muscle that fills the spaces of his life-cradling pelvis. His juices leak around zir fingers.  
  
Laufey growls, full of a burgeoning heat that swells as slowly and inexorably as the glacial grind of Fárbauti’s fingers. His hips work a slow, tightly constrained roll against the hand Fárbauti has curved around his pelvic bone, zir fingers inside him and the heel of zir palm against the base of his cock. The motion is luxurious and strained at once for the effort it takes not to shove needily against Fárbauti's hand.  
  
“You serve me,” Laufey repeats in a whisper, nearly cheek to cheek with Fárbauti in the darkness. His trap is subtle, his words ambiguous enough to lure Fárbauti in.  
  
Fárbauti makes a wordless croon of agreement.  
  
Laufey strikes, nails sinking mercilessly into his companion's nape. There is no sheath of ice on his claws.  
  
“Did you think I didn’t know how many of my warriors you slew?” he demands, low and growling as glacial advance. “How many nobles you bloodied and slapped to humiliation?”  
  
“I do not need orders,” Fárbauti breathes, then gives a surprised sob of a moan. Still zir fingers stretch and fuck so slowly inside of him. Zie knows better than to stop, especially now.  
  
Laufey sucks blood from Fárbauti’s wounded ear, forcing another pained sound from zir. “Asked I you to be protected?”  
  
“They threatened ye,” hisses Fárbauti, zir voice vicious with unspeakable hatred. “They spoke of poison, of murder—”  
  
“They will always threaten me.”  
  
Fárbauti keens a laugh, high and thin, like wind through the canyons. “And why do ye say that as if it changes anything?”  
  
Afraid that his voice will betray him, Laufey draws a raw breath.  
  
“Mín brandr," he says hoarsely, for to endear Fárbauti with pretty words would be an insult. "Mín atgeirr. What a wonder you are, to do such fine, bloody work at the limits of my reach.”  
  
Fárbauti scrapes wicked teeth over the pulse in Laufey’s throat and draws zir fingers out of him, smoothing both hands over the sharp angles of Laufey’s hipbones. “Give ye over,” zie says throatily.  
  
Laufey hitches one leg open wider, only to feel Fárbauti pulling at his hips to make him turn onto his front.  
  
“Nay, over,” zie directs, rumbling a laugh. “Ah, Laufey. Ye have so many rings upon your horns, and yet sometimes ye know so little. Did ye think I would mount ye with your belly big between us?”  
  
Stung resentment makes Laufey struggle now, biting and twisting, though it is contrary to his desires as well as Fárbauti’s. Fárbauti laughs as zie rolls him over on his knees, pinning down his wrists to the bed with ungentle force and spreading his legs open with a knee between them, and they each of them know that it is very nearly child’s play, a mock fight of pushing and open-mouthed bites that offers no threat to Laufey’s babe.  
  
Panting, Fárbauti drapes zir weight over Laufey, one arm curled about his chest to hold his still-resisting form in place. There are a few moments of struggle, their bodies straining against each other in the heady tension of equally matched leviathans, but then Fárbauti's hips jerk and twist just so.  
  
Laufey has but a moment to feel blunt pressure as head of zir length pushes blindly between his legs, sliding across folds wet with need in search of his opening, and then suddenly he is impaled, one swift and ruthless thrust that jolts them both.  
  
The sudden invasion leaves Laufey momentarily without air, his whole body locked rigid at the stretch and burn of another's flesh in the deep places where he has not been touched for years. For a moment he knows nothing but the emptiness of shock, and then white sensation spreads through him in a delayed wave, burning along his nerves to replace shock with feeling so raw and unfettered that he moans aloud, the sound grating in his throat. It is close to pain, close to pleasure, but neither, and it is perfect.  
  
“Laufey...?” breathes Fárbauti against his neck, voice stifled with the effort of stillness.  
  
He shoves back against zir, demanding without pretence. Zie should know better than to expect Laufey to ask.  
  
Fárbauti's noise is laugh and growl, delight and desire. Zir hips move, rocking back and then forth but once, and then Laufey clenches and zie groans and they have the rhythm instantly, the old and familiar pulse of their desires and bodies together. This joining, the feeling of Fárbauti’s heart beating against his own, is worth more to Laufey than any ecstasy of flesh.  
  
Here, Fárbauti is assured in zir right to Laufey's body. Here, zie is ageless, as quick and powerful as the young creature who was the first ever to conquer Laufey soon-ruler, little Nál Guðrunarson, and took him with reverence and eagerness on a bank of glacial till far out in Jötunheimr's wilderness, where young jötnar could freely ramble from hearth and throne in search of the makings of their adulthood.  
  
As zie thrusts into him, deep ploughing strokes that leave Laufey quaking to his bones, Fárbauti slides a hand along his side and beneath his stomach. Zir fingers splay wide to hold the heavy curve of his belly. With some of the weight supported, Laufey can finally arch his spine in demanding response to the pleasure that coils within him, throbbing and nowhere near keen enough.  
  
Fárbauti makes a rough helpless noise against his shoulder, as if pleading for mercy to Laufey's very ancestors through the warlines, and obliges his demand immediately, only too willing and glad to quicken the pound of titan against king.  
  
Laufey's length strains hard beneath him, a sharp and neglected need. He would slake it, but he needs both hands clenched hard in the furs, arms ramrod-solid against the bier of ice below to support his shoulders against the brute force of Fárbauti's every thrust. His cock throbs, slapping against his gravid belly each time he is jolted and sending brief, hot bursts of pleasure through him. The touch is too brief and unfocused to do anything but stoke Laufey's need even higher.  
  
He spits a curse, tortured and savagely satisfied to be so. This is a good way to suffer. Would that all torments were so sweet.  
  
The muscles of his inner places are the first that begin to tighten, a spasming that grows ever stronger with each punishing thrust of Fárbauti's cock. Laufey clenches the rest of his body even tighter in response, growling with effort as he struggles to gain enough stimulation to climax. It heightens the stretched burn, drags a surprised gasp from Fárbauti.  
  
Pleasure turns sharp and white-edged, a sweet thin blade just barely keen enough to cut him deep, deep. Laufey moves relentlessly, striving and gasping for the stroke that will finally reach far enough to pare open the kernel of white-hot release, a seed that sinks heavy roots into his belly as it unfurls, builds, brighter and hotter and bigger—  
  
Until that kernel finally cracks and completion bursts through Laufey like thunder, powerful pulsing waves that leave him baying, hoarse as winter wind. Hard, unlovely noises strip his throat as his muscles continue to flutter around Fárbauti's girth. His body clutches tight, shaking in Fárbauti's powerful arms as the sudden spiralling ebb of high tide wracks Laufey, drags him down deep and slow from the peak.  
  
He breathes like a bellows as Fárbauti continues to fuck him, long strong breaths that anchor him through the unforgiving rhythm. It feels like battle, like comfort, this red violence that soothes and smooths the jagged spurs of stress from his bones, leaving him fluid and easy in his own skin once again. Laufey's body burns gloriously, sated in the aftermath of one release while still suffering sharply from the unslaked cry for another.  
  
Jolted by a spasm of zir own ecstasy, Fárbauti sinks sharp teeth into Laufey's shoulder to muffle a harsh and desperate cry against his flesh. Laufey can feel Fárbauti starting to unravel at last, surrendering to climax now that Laufey has finally been served.  
  
Their movements turn rocky, foundering and snatching without finesse. Fárbauti finally reaches a hand beneath Laufey to take his cock in a fist wet with a hasty stripe of saliva and nothing more. Laufey screams for the sheer joy of it and arches hard, his spine an ungentle crest of rock that Fárbauti thrusts and breaks against. The fevered cry that tears from Fárbauti's throat is the most wondrous noise Laufey has heard in too many bitter years.  
  
They shudder and rock together, a slower harder grind of bodies wringing out their mutual completion. Fárbauti strips the pleasure from him ruthlessly, zir hand pulling wave after wave of release from Laufey until his body is jerking at every touch. Only a dangerous snarl finally forces Fárbauti's hand away from his oversensitive flesh.  
  
Shaking all over, Laufey pulls himself free of Fárbauti's arms with rough force, swiping his nails across the arm that is too slow to withdraw. He goes no farther than the edge of the bed, barely an arm's length of distance ’twixt he and Fárbauti, but collapses on his side to shudder and pant for greedy breath as though he is entirely alone, indifferent to Fárbauti's presence.  
  
The rumble of Fárbauti's laugh sounds from behind him, low and fond. Zie knows better than to take Laufey's coldness as dislike, just as all jötnar know better than to take Jötunheimr's savagery as hatred. It is simply in not in their natures to be kind.  
  
The furs rasp as Fárbauti stretches on the half of the bed zie is allotted, then settles down into wolf-like repose with a contented sigh. In any case, the only reason zie would not cuff Laufey across the head for attempting to entwine their bodies in a soft tangle of sated limbs and panting breath is because he is a ruler. No other would have license to dare so with Fárbauti, and even Laufey would find himself with a displeased and grudging permission.  
  
Sprawled on his side, Laufey simply lays with his eyes closed, breathing deeply of the quiet air. Satiated notes resonate through the long bones of his body, filling him with warmth.  
  
One arm curls unconsciously over his swelling midsection. It is only when a tiny foot kicks directly against his palm that Laufey realizes he has his arm tucked close about his belly in a gesture of unbearable vulnerability. As though he needs to hide from something.  
  
He rolls over abruptly, sitting up to loom over Fárbauti's supine form. Fárbauti flinches at the great and stooped figure of Laufey above zir, drowsing eyelids jolted wide.  
  
“Ah,” zie breathes in startlement, moving to slip from the bed in full retreat. “Forgive me, Laufey. I did not think—”  
  
Laufey's hand brackets Fárbauti's throat like iron, implacable but not painful in any way as he wordlessly guides Fárbauti to lie back down on the furs. Zie moves obediently beneath his touch, feeling no more than unyielding pressure around zir throat, and lies still as Laufey's hand gentles. His palm smooths across zir collarbones and then presses down over zir breastbone. The hard centring of pressure strikes to Fárbauti's core like a spear, grounding zir, holding zir frozen for anything Laufey desires.  
  
“The child is yours,” Laufey rasps, carmine eyes full of shadows and emptiness that hide what goes on in his mind. He brooks no pity for the burden this untruth places on Fárbauti, this Æsir's act sprung from the demands of an Æsir's get.  
  
Bafflement and shock slide across Fárbauti's face. “Nay, Laufey,” zie protests, too startled to consider the wisdom of contradicting him. “'Tis not so. We have not lain together since—”  
  
Laufey leans in so that their noses nearly touch, inhaling the ragged echoes of Fárbauti's torn off words. “The child is yours,” he repeats, and this time it is clear.  
  
He is not admitting it to Fárbauti. He is telling zir that this is how it will be.  
  
Fárbauti's eyes dare what zir tongue does not— to question. They search Laufey's flat stare, mutely asking who could possibly be the child's other half, what forces Laufey to hide his actions when he should be able to claim any jötunn as the other half of his offspring without suffering any kind of censure. He could even choose to announce no lover at all, permit no one to have the peripheral claim that a jötunn has over the children zie does not bear, so that the babe may be spoken of as Laufey's and Laufey's alone.  
  
Laufey sees the thoughts in Fárbauti's eyes: He is Höfðingi; he may bed who he likes. None have the right to speak against those choices. What bedmate could possibly disgrace the ruler of Jötunheimr?  
  
It is a hot and terrible shame that seizes Laufey's soul. No matter that he is a ruler, that he does not need to make apologies for anything and never has… the thought of his actions reflected in Fárbauti's eyes brings Laufey low, makes him regret. If Fárbauti only knew how terribly Laufey had wandered, how rashly he had acted in his urgency to taste the All-Father's blood and sweat...  
  
“Ye honour me, Nál,” Fárbauti whispers against his lips, a breath of fealty and wonder. “The child is indeed mine.”  
  
Laufey bites zir jaw and neck in gratitude, the gentle mouthing of a wolf's fangs against a packmate's snout. Barely breathing, Fárbauti shivers beneath this rare and precious homage.  
  
The closed and tomblike walls of Laufey's chambers are full of secrets and sacred dark, things too raw for daylight that sigh in murmurous chorus as Laufey buries regret beneath the quiet rhythm of Fárbauti's constant heart.  
  


  
  
Not even the casualties that the jötnar sustain as the war rages on are sufficient to reduce the number of hungry mouths to that which can be fed by what little sustenance is being produced by the seaside tjalds and the still-barren oceans. What they manage to hunt, fish, raise and harvest in the midst of war is nigh impossible to transport with any reliability, particularly as Odin has gained total control of the Bifröst site at Inngangagarð as the centre of a rapidly spreading slaughter-field.  
  
Food is scare, then scarcer. Laufey is no Æsir king: he eats what eat his warriors, just as he fights where fight his warriors, and sleeps where and how sleep his warriors. Else, they would despise him. In a time of plenty he could afford to feast and demand tribute to remind them who is ruler. Now he must be careful to take no more than the share afforded one jötunn—aye, particularly now, as some of his nobles and some of their people still think his child-heavy body a weakness and would be glad to put a blade through it if Laufey should give show that he is any less able to defend himself.  
  
All he takes extra, then, are the tiny individual shares of pink salt that some of his nobles wish to render up to him in mimicry of a tithe whenever a caravan makes it through from Saltgarð or another mountain tjald. Salt is now a rarity, an amenity that his warriors cradle jealously on their tongues, eyes closed, to remember days of safe tjalds and month-long nights in the perpetual darkness of winterdeep spent skin to skin with another’s obliging body.  
  
Laufey grows thinner, the gravid (but oh, so small, still too small) curve of his belly standing out even more prominently in the cradle of his sharp-bladed hipbones. At his sides, where muscle stretches not so thickly, his ribs begin to show, like the cage that contains the dýr of hunger and dry-eyed rage within him.  
  
He keeps a pouch of salt crystals at his belt, tiny gems the colour of water-weed and dried salmon flesh, and sometimes cracks one between his teeth to warm himself from the inside out when thoughts of the war and his too-small babe sink too close to his bones.  
  


  
  
There are ravens circling over the field of dead. Laufey knows their names, for his realm has no such warm-blooded creatures and these two can only belong to one Ás. He knows, too, what they have come looking for, but he does not care if Odin’s ravens see him bending over a body in the snow.  
  
The jötunn-that-was lies face up, his ancient face a rictus of hate, with a clean split between his ribs straight to the heart. The horns at his belt, worn in imitation of Laufey’s, are many-branched and longer than any others Laufey has ever seen, their gold bands inset with blue topazes to mark years beyond the capacity of his horns to hold more rings.  
  
In the circumstances of this war, none had trusted Útgarðr-Loki. How could they have, when he had shared Odin’s blood by choice and worn the Asgardian customs of gender like a second skin from long millennia of association? But here he lies, with Gungnir’s mark in his heart and both eyes ripped from his head.  
  
Laufey cranes his gaze upwards and sees the first lord of Útgarðr staring down in disjointed emptiness, the red sclerae of his eyes glistening between the beaks of Huginn and Muninn.  
  
Their wings like black scraps of fabric against the leaden sky, the ravens flutter downwards. Laufey knows what he will see even afore his gaze falls to Odin’s far-off shape, standing alone against the distant horizon.  
  
Viðurr Odin seems to greet the ravens as they perch on his shoulders, but his eyes never leave Laufey. Even from such a distance Laufey can tell that Odin’s eyes are burning with hot, dry rage and grief, and it makes Laufey want to spit, want to demand how Odin can even attempt to place blame on Laufey for this tragedy. All the miserly pleasure Laufey can take from this is the sight of Odin’s shoulders stooping with some burden far heavier than his ravens, the look of exhaustion in his stance and the misery in the bend of his arrogant neck.  
  
Laufey growls in the back of his throat. He wonders if, for all the All-Father’s supposed wisdom, Odin can even tell that Laufey is with child, if he already knows or can see it now through the grey veil of snow and distance between them. He feels a gleaning of ugly triumph to have stolen a shred of Odin’s flesh the way Odin has now torn scraps from the first lord of Útgarðr.  
  
He leans down and takes Útgarðr-Loki’s horns from the corpse, leaving it and all the rest to vanish in the blowing snow that already obliterates Odin’s figure from sight, if not mind.  
  


  
  
Odin slays Fárbauti the next day.


	3. Chapter 3

For days upon days Laufey carries a sickness within him, a knot of fear and nausea and frustration that tightens yet more each morn that dawns without the birth of his child. He finds no relief in the fact that, in these days, he does not see his soon-born slide down his leg in a bloody trickle, either.  
  
Too late for that, the healers tell him—he will have to labour now whether the child is dead or alive—but what do they or Laufey know of Æsir infants?  
  
Perhaps he is meant to carry this half-blooded godling for another year yet, or two, or ten. Perhaps the birth will require seiðr. Perhaps it will claw its way out. _Laufey knows not_.  
  
Indeed, he knows so little of even jötunn birth that he does not recognize the labour when it is upon him. A blue mist seizes him one day in the middle of battle, a shock that racks him to his bones, and suddenly Laufey finds himself strangling the urge to flee as far and fast as he can from Æsir and jötnar alike. It possesses him, the raw blue cowardice, and drives him to utterly animal savagery in poor exchange for the fact that he cannot obey his first instinct.  
  
Laufey does not lie to himself. This is not a matter of want. He needs to flee and does not understand why, but the only thing that cannot be commanded by a ruler is his own body, and ah, it grates at him.  
  
“Höfðingi,” says one of his warriors in the aftermath of the battle, as Laufey stands shaking and gore-soaked in the wheel of carnage he has wrought. Laufey snarls and whirls upon the warrior, who cowers, curls zir shoulders in and lowers zir eyes, only one tremulous finger still outstretched to point at Laufey’s legs.  
  
Teeth bared, he looks, and finds his inner thighs painted with his own blood and fluid, ropes of clotted, purple-black gore looping down to his ankles.  
  
“Have ye never, afore?” asks the warrior—redundantly, for all on Jötunheimr know that Laufey Kinless, Laufey Saltwomb, has never been got with a child of his body no matter how many first lords of the many tjalds have won Laufey’s favour and bested him in the mounting-struggle over the centuries. The warrior’s eyes are still cast down to avoid provoking the feral, incomprehensible instinct howling within Laufey. “Go, Höfðingi, _run_.”  
  
Is that—is _that_ what this is? It is to be expected? But Laufey waits no more to ask of this warrior who bears on zir chest the scars of three children fed of blood and body. He does not stride hence with dignity, but bolts. His warriors know enough to part before him in haste and look away, obeying customs of childbirth that barren Laufey never concerned himself with learning.  
  
Without a concern for the Asgardian war camp pitched dangerously nearby, the mazarine haze of instinct leads Laufey away from the tall gates of Harvetrtjald, away from his throne and towers and dark deep dungeons. It drives him into the teeth of the rising sleet-gale that had encouraged the Æsir to abandon battle for that day, through as many bloody snowfields as Laufey can cross on legs growing weaker by the moment and towards the cracked and folding canyonland.  
  
Now he feels the labour pangs clamping about his body like great jaws. Even as he falters, though, instinct is a hound that snaps on his heels, an ancestral voice from deep in Laufey’s marrow telling him that if he is weak, then he is in danger of being set upon while in labour, and so he must, he _must_ run farther.  
  
Ah, his body, Laufey thinks with agonized delight, breath hissing through his clenched teeth. His body is a thing to be proud of, full-fitted with myriad strengths and secrets hidden even from Laufey himself after all these years. He is an animal with always another hidden claw or fang, growing ever more dangerous in his pain.  
  
At last he can go no further on buckling legs. He staggers down into a crevasse, into one of the narrow caves at its base where the stone has buckled apart from the weight of ice above it. Jagged rocks scrape and squeeze at Laufey’s heaving sides as he claws his way through the fissure until it widens just slightly, just enough for him to collapse there. A few panted words send seiðr-light crackling into the ice that rimes the stone.  
  
Agony comes.  
  
It leeches away his mind in ragged pieces, leaving him almost nothing but the blue instinct and the uncontrollable seizures of his muscles. Laufey is no longer proud of his body—he wants it _gone_ , wants out of it, wants to split himself the rest of the way open and crawl out into the bitingly cold air, where he will be free to scream out the true extent of his pain, unfettered by the limits of his throatstrings: the high, splitting agonies of tearing flesh and the crippling lows of bones bending and cracking apart beneath the pressure. His body is doing to _itself_ what Laufey would not do to any foe.  
  
In the quivering lull between peaks of all-consuming labour, Laufey finds his mind enough to realize in astonished pain that mayhap he hasn’t been as truly brutal a warrior as he always thought he was.  
  
There is a heave, a blinding streak of white agony as something inside him finally _gives_ , and a second, slipperier push, and then suddenly it is over. Laufey almost screams again in the aftermath as his muscles suddenly contract around nothing, too much too fast too _far_ , as the bones of his pelvis try to sink back into their proper places but find everything gouged out and raw, unable to fit back together as they did afore.  
  
And now—he struggles even to _breathe_ in the quivering wreckage of the body he has been left to, unable to grasp at what could possibly come next—now—  
  
Panting for air with ferocious determination, Laufey seizes his pain in an iron fist… and utterly crushes it. It is _here_ , then, here and now that he first truly learns what has resulted from the bitter draught of love of which he has drunk so deeply and unwisely—learns that it has, to his great shock, watered and nourished a kernel of something that is actually of _use_. Something great and dreadful and alarmingly powerful.  
  
Love has made Laufey vulnerable, has shackled him and made him too weak to properly use the child he has borne… and it has planted in him the soul of a gnarled, ruthless dýr, without regard for reason or pain or consequences when it comes to that same child. His flesh bleeds yet more freely as he sits up, and he can ignore it; his bones sing an aria of protest and suffering, and he can disregard them utterly as he feels blindly at the stone between his legs.  
  
His just-born, his babe, Laufey knows zie is there, he must only sit up enough to reach—  
  
For a long moment, Laufey wonders… _where is the infant_? He does not understand what he sees. Blood, fluid, a slick and clotted pool of it freezing on the icy rock; the heap of placenta, purple-blue and marbled with black veins—but where is—  
  
The babe is so very small in his hands, impossibly small to have been the source of such agony. Half incredulous and half _enraged_ , Laufey lifts his get from the ground and cradles zir to his chest with one curled arm, forming a dagger of ice in the other hand to sever the birth cord. His hard, searching stare does not leave the infant even as he twists the length of the cord around several fingers and knots it one-handedly.  
  
This is nothing like he imagined. Astonishment, joy, pride—Laufey does not feel them for the insulted disbelief that possess him. He peels back the remains of the caul from around the infant’s crown and sees only how he could crush the fragile skull in one palm; he jolts the baby into zir first startled, hiccuping breath and hears only how thin the resultant wail is.  
  
And _oh_ , how he knows that Odin must be laughing, for still Laufey loves the child. It is not a sweet emotion. Not even for this utter _failure_ can be he free of the dýr which poisons his priorities and rationality, and it is wretched indeed.  
  
For this, he has screamed and bled and wasted his strength; for this, he has lost the support of his nobles and warriors; for _this_ , he has lost _Fárbauti_ —  
  
He discovers, very abruptly, that it is all too much for him to bear any longer. The last thread of Laufey’s endurance, which has been stretched to its limit for so very long, finally snaps, and all his burdens collapse from his shoulders. He has no more capacity to care, to worry, to rage—to feel anything or be anywhere but here, alone, with the infant in his arms. He cannot do it, and he breaks, and it— just—  
  
— _stops_.  
  
Reflexively clutching the wailing newborn close to his chest, Laufey finds himself gasping for breath at the sudden emptiness that echoes inside of him, reeling with the stunned sensation of blinking into the sun after too long in the dark.  
  
He is so very, very tired.  
  
His babe, his get, his beloved failure of a child. This is all he has strength to think of.  
  
Moving slowly, deliberately, Laufey gets to his feet, drawing his bloodstained cloak tight not for himself but for the babe he carries. His body aches and his bones slide loosely in their wrung-out joints, but his heart is a thrumming core of light centred on the tiny body pressed to his chest; his attention, his whole _being_ focuses there, and the pain happens somewhere beneath a distancing fog.  
  
He has no idea where he is, or how far he ran to get here. In the way such things happen, though, somehow—he will never know how—somehow Laufey returns to Harvetrtjald.  
  
The exhaustion is too great for Laufey to chafe at how he is received when he stumbles in through the gates, weak and gloweringly protective of the baby, which he does not let his warriors even lay eyes upon. He has only the presence of mind to be vaguely glad that his warriors are not the kind of raw, inexperienced creature that Laufey is. They move around him through Harvetrtjald’s halls in competent ways, subtly guiding him to a dozen things he didn’t know he needed until he got them, probably avoiding a hundred missteps that would trigger the instincts still running so high beneath Laufey’s skin.  
  
They see him to a high tower with a small room, where someone has made up a deep nest of furs in a corner, and Laufey would have never imagined that such a thing could make his body sing with the sudden, needy urge to curl in small with his babe and sleep. Someone has been and gone afore them to place a tray of food there, bowls of blushing salt and fat-yellow seal milk, slices of jellied water-weed and wet pink salmon flesh. Someone—whoever it is that tails Laufey up the stairs at a safe distance, to make sure he is able to stagger all the way up—knows not to lock Laufey in, but to let him lock the door behind himself before collapsing in the heap of furs.  
  
Through it all, the baby screams and screams, but Laufey does not give zir even a morsel of the fish or a suck of milk, let alone the sire’s blood that zie needs. He eats and drinks it all without taking his eyes from his child, crumpled and tiny and crying, though it makes something clutch desperately in his chest to do so.  
  
His get has the birthfang in zir tiny, howling mouth, the little knife of ivory that arms jötunn children from the womb. Still, Laufey wonders if it would be enough for the child even were he to open his breast then and there, pierce his skin with a needle of ice and draw open a wound that would be a great scar, long and knotted and many times re-opened, by the time his babe was ready to be weaned. He has an idea that the Æsir nurse their babes as goats do, on milk from udders. There is the vague impression that these udders are what separate “he” from “she”.  
  
(But then, Laufey recalls that Odin All-Father had suck-marks on his chest as well, circles of dark pebbled flesh that had peaked when Laufey had bitten them at the heights of their coupling.)  
  
Laufey’s mood is such that he cannot even choke a mirthless laugh at the thought of a seal or she-wolf playing wet nurse to his half-blooded get. Misery is a poor companion to curl around his throbbing bones in this soft shelter of furs, a constant attendant with the shape of Fárbauti's arms and the aching emptiness of zir absence.  
  
He cannot name the child, not even in his heart of hearts, for a child who has been named is a person, a citizen of the realm Laufey rules, and citizens cannot be deprived of food or left without aid, as Laufey must now do to his babe. This is the jötunn way, that every newborn should suffer three days without the sire. This is the jötunn way, that those babies who survive are given the whole and attentive care they deserve because they have been proven strong and will likely live to grow horns, and that those who do not survive… have at least gone quickly, without causing a waste of food better spent on someone who was not going to die anyway.  
  
Jötunheimr is merciless, and this is the jötunn way.  
  
This must be another backwards Æsir contradiction, Laufey thinks, that love now makes him hate the traditions of his ancestors with every sinew in his gnarled dýr's heart.  
  


  
The child screams, and Laufey rests, and wet needles of sleet hiss against the windowpane as the storm continues to rage, and every moment spent laying there as strength seeps back into his aching limbs brings Laufey the acute knowledge of its passage. The time before him is conspicuously limited. Now that he has torn the blue shrouds of instinct from his mind, the Asgardian war camp barely thirty els from Harvetrtjald's great black Pinnar is a nearly palpable presence on Laufey's skin.  
  
He will rise, soon. He will leave his get and go out to marshal Harvetrtjald's defences again before the next assault; he will walk on shaking legs, find a replacement for the shin guard that he realizes only now must have been lost at some point, see what progress the builders have made in trenching the ice around the Pinnar and steepening the glacis against the curtain wall. Laufey has all these intentions and more, yet for now he lies with his babe, scenting zir skin and touching the dark, wispy _hair_ on the infant's crown, his rough fingers caught between powerful yearning such as he has never known and hesitancy at the sheer unfamiliarity and _wrongness_ of his impulses.  
  
The storm had not broken yet, and does not promise to for a while. He has time yet… but he is a ruler and this is war, and he cannot permit himself too many of these selfish moments. Soon, Laufey will go—soon—  
  
But he does not have the chance. The sound of footsteps on the tower stairs, slapping and hurried, breaks Laufey's attention away from his child. Teeth bared, he surges upright, a dagger of ice forming in one hand as the other curls the bundled infant against his chest.  
  
The intruder that rattles urgently at the door for a few moments before _breaking_ the lock and shoving in unbidden, however, is not the Ás or assassin that Laufey expected but an ashen-faced messenger who nearly falls to zir knees in a combination of exhaustion and plea not to be slain for such trespass.  
  
“He comes,” zie gasps, just as Laufey hears the first icicle-shaking knell of Harvetrtjald's alarm bell. “Bölverkr comes.”


	4. Chapter 4

The sleet-gale was still howling over Harvetrtjald as red war finally crested and broke against the titanic basalt gates, the spires of behemoth ancestors, rising up and against Jötunheimr's finest, highest city like some bloated nightmare creature already swollen to gross proportions from the hate and bloodlust it subsisted on. Sprinting through the chaos of his tjald caught unprepared, with his get in his arms and the bells still clanging overhead, Laufey cannot comprehend how what began as one of Odin's petty cruelties on Midgard has now come to this, _this_.  
  
Curse his bones, but Odin Herteitr must be _laughing_ , because here and now, with battle on Harvetrtjald's threshold, where Laufey's actions should be swiftest and his priorities unquestionably clear, Laufey is instead chained by the babe that Odin put in him. He bolts for the temple instead of the gates, seeking a place where he can safely leave his child. The temple, with its high twisting spires and deep ossuary, covered by a geis of nonviolence that the Nárgoðar will kill to uphold—the temple, where surely even the Æsir will balk to plunder amid the death masks and bones.  
  
Laufey thinks he has never run so fast afore, never stretched his long legs across the familiar halls of his tjald with such desperate speed. Pain tears through him, sharp and horrible, and his legs threaten to buckle with every step. But he must not—he _cannot_ —  
  
Up the great basalt steps and through the ever-open doors of the temple, as the bells peal their song of disaster and death high above; down the narrow and folding stairs cut deep, deep into the frozen bedrock, along a passageway that twists like a snake's writhing coils. Old seiðr-light glisters in the walls. Through the obscuring cloud of his laboured breath, Laufey sees the silently howling skulls of the beasts and jötnar alike that the Nárgoðar of ages past so carefully preserved and interred in discrete wall niches, their bones sparkling with frost.  
  
Even through the weight of stone above him, Laufey is tormented by the thought that he can hear battle breaking over Harvetrtjald's walls and into its streets.  
  
Laufey pushes through the hide covering a doorway like any other, his legs shaking with exhaustion and agony. His child's piercing cries echo against the confines of the small, bare chamber. Pulling his hands away from the bundle is an effort, and leaving even more so once he sees how very frail and abandoned the infant looks, lying alone on the floor.  
  
Would that Fárbauti were here; would that Laufey could leave knowing that there was a mountainous shadow cast over his squalling get as his best and oldest companion stood guard—  
  
He whirls with a snort of self-loathing rage. A vicious armblade shears out from his fingertips so swiftly that it gouges the door frame as Laufey strides from the room once again, climbing stair after winding stair at desperate speeds to reach the surface once more.  
  
Odin is here, and Fárbauti is not, and Laufey has a blade cold enough to freeze the hot song of battle from even that ruthless old beast's war-happy heart.  
  
*  
  
There is blue jötunn blood running down the stairs from the temple's main chamber. Laufey emerges from the ossuary with a roar in time to see an Asgardian sword take one of the Nárgoðar through the chest. His own blade ends the Ás in a spray of hot red blood, but too late for the old jötunn whose life is leaping in dark-blue pulses from the hole placed neatly between zir jutting, skin-bound ribs.  
  
The Nárgoði's finger points rigidly towards the carnage visible through the temple's open doorways, zir age-worn teeth bared in a demanding snarl. Laufey obeys—  
  
—and Gungnir makes a sound like high-pitched thunder as it comes down against the armblade Laufey managed to raise just in time to block Odin's crushing downwards sweep.  
  
Cracks spider along the length of Laufey's blade, which is shored up with a second layer of ice just in time to block a second crippling swing. The force of it drives Laufey backwards in order to spare his trembling legs the futile effort of trying to stand solid against such force.  
  
Odin is gimlet eyed as he battles Laufey back into the temple, nothing but implacable force and focus. Laufey's mind is a whirl of emotion, hate and rage and _fear_ driving the spin and slash of his blades. Here, not _here_ —he would rather fight Odin atop the raw stone of Fárbauti's dark new cairn afore he would let this eagle-eyed Ás so near to Laufey's little babe. Laufey cannot get out, and he cannot go down—  
  
—but to go _up_ is to lead Odin right to the casket upon its consecrated plinth.  
  
And Laufey knows then and there that his child has ruined him for the throne, for surely a good ruler would not have found this choice as easy to make as he does. Knowing all the while that it is a sure road to defeat, destruction, he lets Odin drive him up the spiralling stairs to the temple's summit.  
  
Only the fact that it would bring the tower down around them prevents Odin from unleashing Gungnir's spectral power against Laufey. The walls of the staircase clip the reaping sweep of Gungnir's long blade, which does not prevent Odin from trying; great chunks of ice fly as Laufey dodges blow after blow and Gungnir gouges into the walls instead.  
  
In the split second that it takes Odin to wrench his spear from its sticking place, Laufey sheds his worse-splintered armblade and lunges low to thrust the other at Odin's momentarily open belly.  
  
It cracks apart against the golden plates, too badly damaged to penetrate.  
  
Laufey darts back with a swift hiss, creating new armblades already, and Gungnir cleaves open the stair he was crouched upon, and they are at each other's weapons again.  
  
His feet slide on the stair, wet against the ice. His insides are bleeding again.  
  
Laufey's breath comes in ragged gusts. White-hot agony wrenches through his belly with every step he takes. Odin drives at him with strength as inexorable as ever, his eyes betraying no kind of mercy. Suddenly Odin turns Gungnir's keen point upon him, jabbing sharply past Laufey's defences and opening a wound in Laufey's side. It burns worse than fire.  
  
With a whirl of his shaking hands, Laufey snatches an atgeirr of ice out of the air just in time to force Odin back with a thrust of his own polearm, barely longer than Gungnir. The weapon is unfamiliar in Laufey's hands, loose and unanchored to the lines of his arms, and the glint in Odin's eye says that he knows it.  
  
Laufey's weakened legs finally give at the very top of the stairs—and it is for but a moment, but Odin's face lights with savage intent to strike him down in that space of heartbeats. Laufey flings aside the atgeirr and lunges right into Odin's space with a snarl, desperate enough to surrender everything for this final, savage blow.  
  
The bony sickles of his fingers hook into Odin's eye socket and tear.  
  
A blitz of golden light rushes to gather at Gungnir's tip for barely the handful of moments it takes Laufey to process what is happening, his fingertips still warm in the meat of Odin's skull, and then it all explodes outwards, slamming across his chest and face with force that makes the world go black.  
  
When he jerks his eyes open again, his whole body singing with pain, it is to find Odin staring down at him along the length of Gungnir's golden shaft. In the aftermath of the blast, the icicles on the ceiling of the temple's open-air summit have been broken from their moorings and lie shattered on the floor all around Laufey. Gungnir is at his throat, but it sways with Odin's pain-weakened arm—and Laufey would move, should move, save that his wracked and exhausted bones will move no more. Quivering and panting for breath, he lies still and feels blood drip down the inside of his thighs.  
  
“You look weary, Laufey-king,” Odin says, but he has never looked so old as in this moment, with his frost-white hair spreading out from under his helmet and the dark hole gaping in his face.  
  
Laufey has to bare his teeth in some mirthless mimicry of a smile at the sight. Odin Blindi—nay, Odin _Tviblindi_, now, for his blindness has been made more than metaphorical—still has _no idea_ what Laufey has suffered this day, or that had they fought this battle one day earlier or later it would not be Laufey laid out upon the ice.  
  
“You have not slain me,” Laufey rasps in return.  
  
“Your people will not accept a peace that begins with regicide.”  
  
“...Peace,” grates Laufey, so incredulous that for a moment he cannot grasp fury. “You... speak to me of _peace_?”  
  
“And I will have it.” Odin's one eye slides sideways, to where the winterheart lustres coldly on its plinth. A frisson of pain runs across his face at the pull of muscles inside his bare, frost-blackened socket.  
  
Movement behind Odin draws Laufey's attention to the Ás who has come up the stairs after them. Beneath this man's eyes, he is acutely exposed on the stone at Odin's feet. Aye, he may have been laid low by Odin in even more intimate ways than this afore now, but such a thing is not for this little god's eyes. Because of this, Laufey finally finds the strength to push himself up from the ground, moving slowly and backing away.  
  
His red eyes remain fixed on Odin even as dizziness roars in his skull and tries to send him reeling to the ground again, even as his muscles scream in agony—even as the Asgardian's hands close on the casket's handles and lift it from its plinth. In his bones, Laufey can feel the winterheart keening a note of discordant protest against blood-hot Æsir hands.  
  
“And now?” Laufey asks hoarsely, barely able to force even these small words past the knot of loathing in his stripped throat.  
  
“Now it is over,” pronounces Odin, that arrogant hypocritical fool. It is not _over_ , not when Laufey's realm lies whimpering in shattered pieces. “You and your people will not set foot away from Jötunheimr for some time, if you are wise. I have no further patience in this matter, and you do not have the strength to test me.”  
  
All of his fury rendered mute and impotent, Laufey tightens his fingers around the eyeball in his fist, crushing it into a pulp of vitreous humour.  
  
The bells of Harvetrtjald have gone silent.  
  


  
  
The Asgardian army draws out of Harvetrtjald like the most ruinous of lovers, leaving the wracked and broken shell of what was a titanic stronghold only hours ago. They take their own dead, leaving only jötunn corpses slain on the streets, in homes. Watching this all from high above in the great window of the temple's tower summit, Laufey is viciously pleased to see that the Æsir are forced to carry out most of their bodies in pieces. Bone splinters and pools of leaked marrow float on the ice like wet red mirrors, hot and strange. They forgot, these gods of artifice and construct, wrapped up in fabrics and refined metals which separate them from the world, that the nature of jötunn strength is as unbridled and brutal as the land which feeds and hones that strength.  
  
In the aftermath of battle, the air hangs dead and still, as if the whole realm has been exhausted. The last remnants of the sleet-gale of earlier hours have blown themselves out and now only a dry powder of snow drifts silently down over Harvetrtjald, smooths over the corpses and the rubble. An animal moan of grief resonates in Laufey's chest at the sight of Jötunheimr turning a soft hand to lay down a blanket over her broken children, muffling all sound and sight of their tragedy as if the realm itself mourns.  
  
Laufey's agony has turned to icy numbness. He knows this is not good, to no longer feel pain, but still he stands in the open air high above his tjald, staring out over the broken Pinnar at the dark smudge of the Asgardian war camp on the horizon. He has failed so many times over that this is the least he can do, to stand and watch with unspeakable hate in his eyes until he is sure that the last of Asgard's stain has lifted away from his realm.  
  
Fárbauti is the only one who would have dared to come up to him, though all his people below can see him standing like a ruined sentinel. Therefore, nobody does.  
  
An aureole of light blooms in the sky above the war camp, prismatic colours shimmering through the leaden clouds. It intensifies, burgeons and then erupts in a thundering column that sends up a whirl of stirred snow from the ground. Laufey's narrow eyes do not relax as the Bifröst withdraws, for he knows it will come again.  
  
And again. And again. The roar of artificial wind reaches Laufey across the plain, driving prickles of icy snow against his skin. Bit by bit, he watches the dark blot of the camp disappear, folding in on itself until the very last trace of Asgard vanishes in a boiling jet of variegated light.  
  
A shock wave slams through the air, silent and hard enough to slam the breath from Laufey's chest.  
  
He drags in a shocked breath, teeth clenched against the spasm of dizziness that sweeps over him. It is only when his lungs are full but the hollow in his chest remains, however, that Laufey realizes _why_ there is still a chasm yawning behind his ribs, gaping wide and bottomless as the Underdýr's maw.  
  
The winterheart is gone. The breath has been ripped out of Jötunheimr's lungs, and will not come again. Soon the cairns of all the jötnar who were slain in this war will be littered with the horns of their living kin, horns withered and fallen as his people pine for lack of their casket’s song.  
  
Thought strikes him like a knife. Will his babe even grow horns? Or will zie pass century after century crowned only by the shame of zir sire's failure?  
  
A haze of whipped snow hangs over the horizon, blurring everything, and Laufey must finally turn away.  
  
And then the sky breaks open again.  
  
Uncomprehending, Laufey looks back. What more can the All-Father possibly wish to visit on them?  
  
Tessellated light whirls in the sky, much farther in the distance than the site of the former war camp. From one side of Harvetrtajld's high aerie, the land unfolds in a long slope to the seaward side of the continent, down hillocks and distance-greyed valleys strewn with the ruin of war. It is there, a thousand els away and just on the farthest edge of Laufey's vision, that the Bifröst touches down— at Inngangagarð.  
  
It takes Laufey several long seconds to realize that it has not withdrawn as it should.  
  
Tremors shudder through the earth like writhing snakes, rattling the bones of buildings sunk deep into the bedrock. Icicles snap and clatter to the ground; those panes of ice which survived the battle shatter from their window frames. An alarmed cry rises from Harvetrtjald, the stunned moans of the wounded and the survivors sharpening into hoarse fright. Now this, on top of everything they have already suffered today— will it never end?  
  
Laufey does not understand. He has never seen aught like this before, not in all his thousands of years. The vortex of the Bifröst blazes through the cloudy sky, a beacon of light growing brighter and brighter as the quaking worsens. Huge skeins of lightning are beginning to crackle out of the clouds, dragged into the Bifröst's well like threads to a spindle. It roars, and the ground shudders.  
  
Heartbeats later, the temple heaves beneath Laufey's feet. The bells of Harvetrtjald give a dissonant clang above the tide of screaming, slammed about in their moorings by the quake. A cyclone of whirling snow and ice has formed around the Bifröst, lashed through with lightning that breaks through the air with a reek of ozone.  
  
Laufey's despairing scream is lost in the din as he sees a distant cloud of rubble and stone, the shattered bedrock of Inngangagarð itself, flung into the sky like so much fractured glass.  
  
Harvetrtjald’s walls fracture under the savagery of the quake. The titan fortifications break into pieces and his people shriek, and the maelstrom of sound feels as though it will burst Laufey's eardrums and crack his ribcage open, a cataclysm like the end of the world thundering down upon them all, and then suddenly—  
  
—it is over.  
  
The distance to Inngangagarð is such that no sound carries through the air to Harvetrtjald, no nightmarish shriek of ice and rock. There is nothing but utter, eerie silence ringing in Laufey's ears as he watches the entirety of Inngangagarð shear away from the cliff and tumble with agonizing finality into the yawning chasm that the Bifröst left split into the earth.  
  
Distantly, Laufey feels his whole body shaking with rage, but he cannot move his limbs.  
  
Peace? Is this what the All-Father meant by _peace_? There he stood, warning Laufey not to test his patience by straying soon from Jötunheimr, and then he destroyed their Bifröst site. They could not now strike out at the Nine Realms again if they wanted to.  
  
They have been stripped of breath and pulse, their fields burned and tjalds slaughtered like those of Vanaheim before them, and now they are trapped within their own realm just as are the ants that crawl across the wet green surface of Midgard. Bölverkr has bound Laufey's realm like a hobbled horse, cut off from the branches of Yggdrasil and left unable to even prevent anyone from coming through from another end of the Bifröst to maraud upon Jötunheimr at its weakest.  
  
In the ruined streets below, someone is keening with grief, thin and shrill. Like a baby.  
  
The numbness around Laufey's mind splinters apart. He whirls about, heedless of the agony that tears through muscles that had clenched up and stiffened, and strides for the cracked stairs. Purpose beats in his blood.  
  
There is life yet in Harvetrtjald, on Jötunheimr, and it needs to be protected. The Dýr of the deep does not have them all yet, and nor will it, until Laufey no longer has the strength to snatch his people back from its fangs.  
  
Odin has not slain them. Laufey will not _let_ Odin slay them with this slow death, this starvation of the soul that wears hollow caves in the bedrock of the jötunn heart.  
  
He has brought his people thus far, and he will take them farther. He will give them little victories to make them live: tjalds rebuilt in spite of Odin's wrath, survival in the face of utter desolation... and a child of Odin's own blood snatched away, kept safe despite all odds and cradled in the hearts of the jötunn people until one day zie rises to tear the All-Father down. Until Laufey's fragile little wonder is everything Laufey was not, and more.  
  
That will be one day. Right now it is fever-dreaming, desperate hope that Laufey holds aloft like a light to make himself believe it is worth struggling forward. Right now, all he truly wants is his babe held safe within the fortress of his great arms, which for all their strength are still only good enough to protect this one thing.  
  
Urgency is a hound that harries him, driving him past the open doors of the ruined temple without a second glance outside and down into the temple's depths. Now he stalks again these labyrinthine passages that he ran not hours ago, his fleet-footed wolf's stride crippled by pain.  
  
There is no blood here, no violence in the cold stone spaces of the ossuary, and Laufey feels his heart loosening already with relief.  
  
He can nearly see shades filling the halls, murmuring _zie lives zie lives zie lives_ like the chorus in his veins, and he knows such spirits to be true, for that is the power of this place. Old souls live here, old power breathes. Laufey will write runes and spill blood in repayment; he will build an empty cairn to stand monument for each one of these jötnar whose bones and ghost guarded his babe through the surge and break of battle, he will…  
  
Laufey's hand has curled around the edge of the curtain and pulled it aside before it registers with him that the curtain was already askew when he came to it, halfway open when he had left it closed.  
  
His heart plunges through ice into deep black seawater and never returns.  
  
There is silence, silence— no wailing of an infant, no whisper of the shades whose chorus is suddenly absent.  
  
There is a moment where Laufey believes he has drawn aside the wrong hide, but then he knows.  
  
This is not the wrong room. It is simply _wrong_.  
  
The ruler of Jötunheimr falls to his knees in the doorway of the empty chamber, beneath the bones of his ancestral halls and the ruin of his realm, and screams as the dýr of his soul gouges its claws into his heart and flays him bloody.  
  


  
  
The ruler that emerges from the ossuary is a pitiless creature with dry, unblinking red eyes, his bones unbroken but his figure twisted in bitter ways.  
  
Odin did not slay him. Sorrow will not slay him either, because now Laufey knows he was meant for Gungnir's blade all along. He will have no other end than that one, whether it comes now or in centuries. He can wait for the Nornir to correct the mistake that should have seen him slain along with his child.  
  
Laufey goes through the motions of rebuilding from the war with hollow frigidity, acting because he must but not because he wants to. He is a colossus of stone, unfeeling and hard, his flesh seemingly invulnerable to the ravages of hunger and assassin-blades which fall upon him.  
  
He hangs the assassins over Fárbauti’s great black cairn, giving their craven ghosts unto Fárbauti’s needle-nailed hands for zir satisfaction. It does not please him, the thought of his old companion reaping from even beyond the Dýr’s Shadow. Nothing pleases him.  
  
Nothing sorrows him, either. Increasingly dire reports of starvation and raiding among the far tjalds fall upon Harvetrtjald like bitter wind, but they find Laufey unmoved, unflinching. What do the distant deaths of little jötnar he has never known compare to the loss that has left his chest a bone-bound cage of teeth and squamous pain?  
  
( _What didGinarr do_ , he wonders, sweeping up and down the halls of his stronghold in fits of frantic rage that drive him to circle and snap at his own heels like a chained hound, _what did the Gallows-Reaper do with the child— by Múspellsheimr and Hel’s necrotic black_ Gates, _what depravity worse than a smashed skull did Odin have in mind that he could not commit in that cramped empty chamber_?)  
  
He swallows the bereavement, the needle-sharp grief, as only a jötunn knows how. He hoards his hate jealously, hones it against the insides of his ribs, but has nowhere to lodge his bitter blade—  
  
and so it sticks in his throat, cutting his insides with every breath  
  
and Laufey upon his crumbling throne drowns alive on the black blood of loathing  
  
and despite their scraping efforts, Jötunheimr wastes thinner and duller with every passing moon, all its thunderous icy gleaming turning slowly  
  
slowly  
  
to blackness.  
  
(And somewhere very far away, the only child of ruler Laufey Augaþjófr grows up beneath the cold one-eyed gaze of Odin All-Father.)


End file.
